Letter of the Week – “It murders my Pink Island original UK copies.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he had purchased (emphasis added):

Hey Tom,  

I want to say a big THANK YOU for the Hot Stamper’s you sent to me. Two of them are now top ten titles in my collection: Cat Stevens Tea for the Tillerman.

I’m so amazed and lucky – I can’t describe it.

The sound is so natural and beat my expectations in many ways – it sounds out of this world. This copy has sweet, breathy vocals, well-defined bass (!!), stunning clarity, warmth and richness, immediacy, astonishing transparency (it burns direct in your DNA – I’ll never forget!) and loads of ambience and more.

It murders my pink Island original UK copies.

It was a privilege to be able to hear this copy – a HIGHLIGHT event. It’s a Demo Disc of the highest order. And it’s worth the price.

The other big winner is CSN’s first album. This is one of the few LP’s with sound that you won’t soon forget. I live since a week with this good feeling and I can’t hear or rate any other LP at this time (‘til Tillerman arrived).

Erik S. 

Erik,

Thanks for your letter. Both CSN’s first album and Tea for the Tillerman belong in any audiophile’s rock and pop collection worthy of the name.

I’ve made it my life’s work to find the best sounding pressings of both of these classics, and as you can now attest, that work has not been in vain. There can be no denying it: You have the Hot Stamper proof in your hands, on your turntable, or sitting on your record shelves as the case may be.

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Symphonie Fantastique – Three Mastering Options

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Berlioz Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Years ago we played a reissue of the title you see pictured which prompted us to make some observations and ask some questions about the approach the mastering engineer might have taken.

And this one comes complete with the bonus 7″ entitled “Berlioz Takes a Trip,” in which Bernstein explores the work “with musical illustrations by the New York Philharmonic.”

Clocking in at around 45 minutes, Symphonie Fantastique is a difficult work to fit onto a single LP,  which means that the mastering engineer has three options when cutting the record:

  1. Compress the dynamics,
  2. Lower the level, or
  3. Filter the deep bass.

On this side two it seems that none of those approaches were taken by the engineer who cut this record in the early 80s — there’s plenty of bass, as well as powerful dynamics, and the levels seem fine.

How he do it? Who knows? Like so much in the world of records, it’s a mystery.

What’s Your Theory Then?

Side one, however, is bass shy. Did the engineer filter out the lower frequencies, or is it just a case of pressing variation being the culprit. Who can say?

If we had many more copies with these same stampers for side one, all with less bass, we might be able to draw a conclusion about that, one that might be highly probable but of course not dispositive, black swans being a regular part of our experience.

The very next copy we might find with those stampers could have plenty of bass.

Then we would be forced to say that our highly probable theory had been falsified conclusively.

So much for theories.

Which is one of the main reasons we avoid them. We play the records to find out how they sound. We don’t feel the need to theorize about them much.

We are more inclined to the No Theory approach to finding good records, which you can read about here.

We think the audiophile community would be better served by engaging  in more critical listening and less theorizing, speculating and opining.

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Should You Feel Guilty about Owning the CBS Half-Speed?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Rock and Pop Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

The review you see reproduced below was written in 2010 or so. As embarrassing as it may be in the eyes of some audiophiles, I think I actually owned the very pressing we reviewed at the time.

Back in the dark days of the 80s, if an audiophile pressing sounded better than whatever random domestic copy I had managed to find up — not knowing anything about pressings variations — I would unhesitatingly give it a home in my collection. As far as I was concerned, it was the best way to hear the music, and what could possibly be more important than that?

I didn’t see it as a stopgap or benchmark the way I would see it now. For the purposes of enjoying the music, the Half-Speed was simply the best available pressing I was aware of at the time.

(“What I was aware of at the time” is at the heart of every mistaken judgment we audiophiles make. We can’t be blamed for not knowing what we don’t know. What we can be blamed for is not acting on the available information that makes it easy to learn just how much we don’t know and what we may be missing as a result.)

Keeping bad sounding records in my collection is something that I did that with many of the records I owned, long after I should have known better, including a favorite of mine, Powerful People. When my stereo finally got good enough to show me how MoFi had clearly ruined the sound, I was mortified, and rightly so.

But all through the 80s and 90s I cannot deny that I played that Mobile Fidelity pressing scores of times and loved every minute of it. The Half-Speed of Guilty too, just not as often. (How much of Barbra Streisand’s nasally-challenged singing can one man take? We all have our limits!)

Back to Guilty

You may find this hard to believe, but I have been a fan of Bab’s Guilty album since it came out. It’s definitely the only Streisand record I would have in my collection, if I still had a record collection.

And if I still had a record collection, lots of Radio-Friendly Pop albums would be in it because I love many of the albums that comprise that genre, from Sergio Mendes and Brazil 66, to Bread, to Loggins and Messina and Hall and Oates and hundreds of others. We even have some for sale on the site as Hot Stamper pressings.

AMG loves Guilty too, which I am pleased to see:

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Shostakovich / Symphony No. 5 in Living Stereo

More Living Stereo Titles

  • An early Shaded Dog pressing of this wonderful recording with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) Living Stereo sound or close to it from start to finish
  • It’s also fairly quiet at Mint Minus Minus, a grade that even our most well-cared-for vintage classical titles have trouble playing at
  • This spectacular Demo Disc recording is big, clear, rich, dynamic, transparent and energetic – here is the sound we love
  • We guarantee that this original pressing resolves musical information like no other copy you’ve heard
  • The best copies are not harsh or shrill the way so many copies are – our Shootout Winners give you all the size and energy as well as the smoothest possible strings
  • The RCA has a bit more of the vintage Living Stereo Tubey Magical sound from back in the day compared to the London with Kertesz, which, although a bit more modern, is every bit as good

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James Taylor / One Man Dog – A Personal Favorite and Forgotten Gem

More of the Music of James Taylor

  • This early Green Label pressing boasts STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from start to finish – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Big, rich and solid on both sides, with a more relaxed, musical quality, as well as the clarity that was missing from most other copies we played
  • The sound of the best pressings is raw, real and exceptionally unprocessed
  • There is not a false note to be found on side one: it’s brilliant from start to finish, and side two is almost as good – we love the Abbey Road-like medley that makes up most of it
  • “Taylor turns in his best singing performance, running through the songs with fire, force, and enthusiasm…” – Rolling Stone
  • If you’re a fan of old JT, this overlooked title from 1972 surely belongs in your collection

Play Chili Dog here, one of our favorite tracks, and note not only the clarity and spaciousness, but the PUNCH and LIFE of the music. This song is supposed to be fun. The average compressed dull copy only hints at that fact.

Then skip on down to the hit at the end of the side, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight, another favorite track for testing. There’s a lot of bass in the mix on this track, but the best copies keep it under control. When it gets loose and starts blurring the midrange, the vocals and guitars seem “blocked”. The best copies let you hear all that meaty bass, as well as into the midrange.

One Man Dog, like many early WB pressings, has a tendency to be dull and opaque. (Most side twos have a real problem in that respect.) When you get one like this, with more of an extended top end, it tends to come with much more space, size, texture, transparency, ambience and openness.

Of course it does; that’s where much of that stuff is, up high. Most copies don’t have nearly enough of it, but thankfully this one does.

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

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Black, Green, Yellow, Orange – Which Contemporary Label Has the Best Sound?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Albums Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We’ve learned a lot about this amazing sounding record over the last twenty years. Check out the latest updates.

Our Hot Stamper commentary from a long-ago shootout we’d done for the wonderful Helen Humes album Songs I Like to Sing discusses the sonic characteristics we find most commonly associated with the various Contemporary labels.

This Contemporary Black Label Original LP has that classic tube-mastered sound — warmer, smoother, and sweeter than the later pressings, with more breath of life. Overall the sound is well-balanced and tonally correct from top to bottom, which is rare for a black label Contemporary, as they are usually dull and bass-heavy.

We won’t buy them locally anymore unless they can be returned. I’ve got a box full of Contemporarys with bloated bass and no top end that I don’t know what to do with.

UPDATE 2020

This commentary was written a long time ago. There are no boxes full of Contemporary records laying around in the back room. The ones that don’t sound good were sold off years ago.

Like most mediocre-to-bad sounding records we’ve auditioned, they just sit in a box taking up space. All of our time and effort goes into putting good pressings on the site and in the mailings. It’s hard to get motivated to do anything with the leftovers. We paid plenty for them, so we don’t want to give them away, but they don’t sound good, so most of our customers won’t buy them.

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Bad Benson and Bad Audio – It’s a Match

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of George Benson Available Now

UPDATE 2026

Some notes about this shootout from years back may be instructive.

White Hot Stamper sound on side two, which means this copy has the power to show you just how well-recorded the album really is, and how much energy and drive there is to both the sound and the music.

No other side of any copy earned the full Three Plus White Hot grade, so this is a very special side indeed. [Now that we are much better at our jobs — see the advice at the end of this review — this happens only a few times a year.]

We didn’t run into any awful CTI originals the way we do with the typical rock record from the 70s, but it’s the rare copy that has a real top end, or much in the way of transparency, or freedom from smear. This copy has all three, without any sacrifice in richness or Tubey Magic.

Rich, full-bodied sound is not hard to find on Bad Benson; most copies had the goods in the bass and lower midrange.

Your Old Stereo (If You Had One in the Seventies)

On the other hand, clarity, top end, transparency and freedom from smear were hard to come by on all but a few copies. Most copies sound pretty much like your old ’70s stereo system — you know, the one you had with the three-way box speakers sitting on concrete blocks.

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“We Have Different Views of Digital”

Basic Concepts Every Audiophile Needs to Understand

A friend writes:

We have different views of digital. I think I’m more with Neil Young. When you have a choice, you go analog and find the best sounding record. But there is a world out there that uses digital. We’re not going to stop that. So the fact that digital is markedly better than it was years ago is significant. Now I think your view is… why would I want to bother with digital when I know the answer: The best sounding record I can find.

You don’t even use your car stereo to listen to music, right?

I used to really rock out in my 2002 3 series BMW outfitted with Harmon Kardon components. That was a killer system, the best car stereo I ever owned. (The Burmester in our new German SUV does some things well, but since it does not offer CD playback, and I’ve never hooked my phone up to it (or anything else for that matter), I’m sure I have never heard it at its best.)

In some ways my BMW system brought to light faults I did not know existed in my old tube home stereo, and that’s when I knew I needed to make a change. Talk about a wake up call! (More on that subject coming down the road I hope.)

I would take issue with modern digital being better. I am not sure if there is much evidence to support that. The best digital sound I have heard, and guys like my friend Robert Pincus swear by, are the CDs created in the 90s, before they learned how to “make them better.”

Back in the day we played them on the CD players we had picked up at reasonable prices (why spend the money?) that seemed to offer a more natural, analog sound. Out of the two dozen or so CD players I’ve tried over the years, I might have found three or four that offered sound that was strikingly similar to analog.

(None of the ones I heard with lots of fancy clocks and separate components ever did anything for me, but of course I would never say that that approach to digital can’t or doesn’t work. I just never heard one that did. If you have one, more power to you.)

I’ve thrilled to “digital that doesn’t sound digital” for thousands upon thousands of hours. Done a lot of work tweaking and tuning the stereo using CDs. Like the records we’ve listed that helped us dramatically improve our playback, there are plenty of CDs that fit that bill too.

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Miklós Rózsa – Quo Vadis (Music From the Film on London)

More Decca & London Records

  • These sides are clear, full-bodied and present, with plenty of space around the players, the unmistakable sonic hallmark of the properly mastered, properly pressed vintage analog LP
  • This 1978 re-recording of Rózsa’s original work for the 1951 film, here performed by the Royal Philharmonic in glorious orchestral sound
  • The Decca pressing is on the TAS Super Disc List, and those are the ones that always win our shootouts, but the London pressings can also have excellent sound and tend to be priced much lower owing to the fact that they are much more findable here in the states
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Rózsa gets spirited performances out of the orchestra and the chorus, but with the latter he also achieves a level of subtlety in their performance of his work which greatly enhances the finale to the piece.”

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Rimsky-Korsakov / The Tale of Tsar Saltan / Ansermet

More of the Music of Rimsky-Korsakov

  • This London stereo pressing boasts big, bold, dynamic Tubey Magical Double Plus (A++) sound from first note to last
  • No question this is a Demo Disc quality recording – it’s rich and real, with huge WHOMP factor down low, as well as clear, uncolored brass and robust lower strings
  • Here is the kind of depth and three-dimensional soundstaging that the recordings by Ansermet and the Suisse Romande are famous for
  • We would love to be able to find Ansermet’s Scheherazade on London, but as you may have read on the blog, the right stampers of that record are almost impossible to find these days, although that has not stopped us from trying
  • No question this is a Demo Disc recording – it’s rich and real, with huge WHOMP factor down low, as well as clear, uncolored brass and robust lower strings
  • The Speakers Corner pressing of Ansermet’s famous recording is mediocre, with many faults, all discussed here
  • We would love to be able to offer our customers Ansermet’s Scheherazade on London (not Decca!) vinyl, but as you may have read on the blog, the right stampers of that record are almost impossible to find these days, although that has not stopped us from trying

James Walker was the producer, Roy Wallace the engineer for these sessions from 1957 in Geneva’s glorious Victoria Hall. It’s yet another remarkable disc from the Golden Age of Vacuum Tube Recording.

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